32 – Secret Societies

The problem with rewinding time is that it cannot be un-rewound. The process cannot be undone. Events cannot be restored after they get deleted. The only way to get them back is to live through the same choices, hoping that no butterflies flutter their wings in the meantime.

Life went on as usual, without anyone being aware of the effect of the butterfly just yet. It was unclear whether Aubrey had seen the video or not, for she did not mention its existence to anyone, nor did her behavior deviate by one bit from her usual snappiness. Had she and Albert interacted more on a day-to-day basis, perhaps something would have come out. Albert knew of what happened and was bound to be overly sensitive to even the smallest change in the way the girl looked at him. But he didn’t. And so, life went on.

The current daily challenge was called patience training. Albert was not very keen on doing it now, or ever for that matter, but he knew that unless he completed it no more daily quests would come to take its place. It was not a good thought to think. The only thing he could do was procrastinate. He was one of those people who could be called serial procrastinators in the past, always waiting until the last possible moment before getting things done, only starting a job when the pressure and the anxiety that came from an approaching deadline became too much to handle. And he had been good at it. Not once had his assignments turned out bad, or his grades been below expectations.

But he always knew in his heart that he could have done more and better had he not procrastinated. And every time he swore it would be the last. This time he thought he could be different.

Perhaps it was because it was magic we were talking about, and not something he truly did not feel like doing. His college course was not at all what he expected it to be, and the level of effort that was required of him to pass classes was not sustainable with his disinterest for the subjects. Perhaps there were other reasons too, and he secretly hoped that he could gain access to the learning skill before it was exams season.

Putting the matter aside, he decided to do the quest now rather than later, skipping the indefinite amount of time that he would have inevitably spent obsessing over the fact that the had to do it. The system was as happy as it always was to transport him away.

Unfortunately for Albert, it was during the time he was away in the quest space that something finally happened with the video on Aubrey’s phone. What ended up happening was out of any possible planning or expectation, and indeed would have surprised Albert a lot if he was in the real world to witness the event as it unfolded. He wasn’t, instead spending the next ten hours in forced bullet time – plus some rewinding – inside the quest space to complete the challenge. While he spent north of a hundred subjective hours doing who knows what, however, Marc was very much active in the material plane of the universe.

He was scrolling through TikTok when he saw the video for the first time. He almost scrolled past it in usual TikTok doomscroll fashion, when his brain registered that something was not right and aborted the scrolling action about to be performed. He squinted, while a thin veil of sweat appeared on his forehead. There it was, in full cropped vertical grandeur: the video of someone hidden behind the camera allegedly creating a fireball and wreaking havoc in a small café in town. Ending with “say hello to alternate you.”

There were no visible faces, thank god. They were either cropped out of the picture or blurred away, but the location was unmistakably the place where he and friends had their afternoon snack the other day. What the fuck did Albert do there?

He remembered Albert mentioning that he wanted to come clean to Aubrey and Colin about the whole magic matter, but he eventually decided against it. It looked like the ‘reason’ was not born of reasoning or intuition but of experience.

Marc decided not to ask himself how the video ended up on Aubrey’s phone, instead taking stock of what he could measure. She had uploaded the video on her personal account on TikTok and TikTok only, with the captions and hashtags hinting at it being an experiment in CGI and video editing. It was not very viral yet, but it was gathering a few thousands likes and it was bound to reach the algorithm sooner or later, thanks to the catchy tune and the clever montage. It looked like she was indeed skilled at editing, but the main content of the video had not been born of computer generated imagery and he knew it well.

This was a video recorded on her phone in a universe that then got rewound away when something went wrong. Now it was online, on the internet, uploaded on the number one social network in the world. Why would Aubrey do something like this?

Risk… assess risk… beyond whatever motives Aubrey might have had, it was important to assess the possible consequences of the video being posted online. It was too late to take it back for sure, and confronting Aubrey about it was bound to make matters worse in the way only an admission of guilt could rival. But perhaps it was not the problem Marc’s subconscious was making it out to be as a first reaction.

Unless the CIA or some other agency went to pay a visit to Aubrey’s house. It was impossible, right? They could never expose themselves like this. Right.

He could already feel his body stop sweating and cool down a bit. After all, he could see that it was not a clever use of After Effects and that it was actual magic only because he had seen the fireballs in action himself. The others had not. Nor did anyone else in the world. And the feds were too dumb to even notice anyway. Or did they? What was the probability that enough other people had magic that the presence of a video on the internet would trigger a possibly nefarious scenario?

He better hop on 4chan and other forums. A lot of seemingly bogus conspiracies were suddenly looking much more plausible than they had been mere moments ago. If there was any trace of another instance of magic escaping secrecy and coming into the public eye, then he could study what happened later and extrapolate. Meanwhile he would keep the video under scrutiny and study how it was doing in the algorithm.

Three hours later it occurred to him that perhaps he should warn Albert.

Unreachable.

Shit.

Was something wrong? Had something happened to him?

He better go at his house immediately.

***

While all this was happening, and the video was gathering hundreds of thousands of views for its uncanny realism, Albert was spending his time completing the quest the system had given him, the patience one. And what a quest it was.

The system first demanded that he stared at a wall for hours on end, and then it began throwing idiotic tasks at him one after the other, like hour-long sessions of mediation, practices with questionable people who looked like the caricature version of Indian spiritual masters, and solving puzzles and mazes in bullet time.

It felt stupid, and a waste of time. At the beginning.

He went in hoping to be done as soon as possible, the worst mindset one could ever have when the task is literally about patience. And the impatience was quickly washed away, at first by a deep sense of resignation and defeat, but then as time passed and the hours ticked away – a hundred hours and more spent without sleeping and without the need to sleep thanks to some magic by the system – things began to change. A new idea began to sprout in Albert’s mind.

What if there was no need to do everything always all the time?

What if he could choose what he wanted to do, and he could accept the idea of sacrificing other things no matter how interesting they looked? There were only so many hours in a day, and the rewind and the bullet time were no solutions to this problem. What they were was the opposite, because they gave him the illusion of being able to control time when in fact he did not have any more power over it than he did before. All he had was the illusion of control.

Why not learn to accept the finitude of one’s ability to do things, and begin to focus on what truly matters? There is no need to do the daily quest every single day if there are other things to do. Especially because the daily will be there the next day, without disappearing.

Suddenly so many of Albert’s worries revealed themselves for what they were: problems he was creating himself. And they could vanish just as quickly as they came, in theory. True, in practice it was not going to be so easy, but perhaps a little change in mindset every day could go a long way.

In the end, although he would never do something like it ever again if he could avoid it, Albert had to admit that the patience training was quite useful.

Then he was back in the real world, surrounded by three health potions, three mana potions, some money and a madly ringing phone that immediately put to the test his newly acquired mindset.

Marc was spamming him with messages. What the hell was going on?

***

There was a small café in downtown Temalas city. One of the few places still run like the old days, before late-stage capitalism infected everything with the urgency to do more and to do it quicker. It was one of those places where you could still go and have a little chat with friends, or perhaps you could study or relax while watching the cars come and go on the busy road that was clearly visible through the wide window.

Not today, however. And not because the window was covered by a thin layer of opaque frost either. Quietly, without too much fanfare, the shop had been closed and taped off with red and white plastic tape. The door was closed shut. The owners nowhere to be found, gone to places their neighbors and family would never find them.

Samantha arrived on location shortly after she was done with the owners, confirming what her underlings had told her: they didn’t know anything. But she had seen the video many times, analyzed it over and over again and she was sure. The video was authentic, shot on location and what little tampering had been done to it did not involve the part that interested her the most. It was still up online of course, it would be too suspicious to bring it offline.

But with the excuse of road work, the whole place had been sealed off and she could be free to operate.

“Nothing’s amiss, ma’am.” Said one of the grunts. Man, she missed the two other underlings of her. They were dangerous and deranged, but they were not this dumb.

“I can literally smell the time magic. Can’t you detect it?”

The man huffed, annoyed, moving with slow movements towards the detector that was dangling limply from his toolbelt. Still, he reluctantly punched the numbers and focused the detector on tachyonic energy. Then his face went from bored to surprised, to straight out disbelief.

“It’s… so high. It’s off the charts! The detector must be malfunctioning!”

Samantha shook her head. “It’s not. That’s why I can almost taste the magic myself. It’s thick enough that even a normal can feel it. We have a time mage on the loose, a very powerful one. And something tells me it’s connected to what PsyOps did at the Fence. Get me a helicopter, it’s time to take a trip to the CARF.”